How to Create an SEO Campaign

SEO is a critical element to your business’ online success. A successful SEO campaign can help your website get more targeted visitors, and your business achieves a higher level of brand awareness. For that, try to use the SEO report template, with which you will be on track all the time.

There are so many components and KPIs in an SEO campaign, so where to begin with?

A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating an SEO Campaign

Use this strategy to create a successful SEO campaign for your business.

Step #1 Know Where You Stand

The first thing to do is find out if your content is visible to search engines. This is important as only then can your website be indexed and listed by search engines.

You’d want to have everything in HTML text format, including non-text content such as Flash files, Java applets, and images. Another option to make this content visible to search engines is to provide a transcript for video and audio files, assign alt attributes to png, jpg, or gif, repeat any content that’s in Java or Flash plug-ins, or use CSS styles on images instead of text.

MozBar and Google Search Console are great tools that can help you check what elements are visible to search engines. Or simply try to enter "site:domain.com" to see what is on Google.

Step #2 Know Your Competitors

Find out who your broad and niche competitors are and see where you stand in terms of SEO in comparison with them. Ahrefs is an excellent tool to check on-site competitive rank with keywords as well as to measure up to off-site factors.

By learning more about your competitors, you’re getting an SEO insight for free. You can see what works for them, especially if they have a high ranking, without wasting your money. Using the right rank tracking tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush will help you have a clean image of where you stand currently with your keywords positions, and you can compare it with competitors to know where you should improve in order to get higher on the SERPs.

Step #3 Find Out Your Target Audience

A successful SEO strategy requires knowing the pain points of your target audience. Therefore, you have to know their needs and whether you’re meeting them. This will help you develop a plan for your content that needs to be centered around your audience’s needs and solutions to their problems.

Step #4 Create a Keyword Plan

Besides writing content that resonates with your audience, you have to add keywords that are focused on their pain points. In this way, your content won’t focus on the general population but on a narrowed group of people.

The purpose of keyword research is not just about getting more traffic. It’s about getting the right quality traffic. Therefore, you have to consider conversion rates to make the right decision.

The first thing to do is make a long list of keywords based on your content. Any category or word you don’t understand should be searched on Google so that you learn if that’s what you’re trying to accomplish. You don’t want keywords that don’t convert. Check the keywords’ estimated search volumes and pick only those that meet your expectations.

For example, find if people search more for ‘honey and lemon water’ or ‘honey, lemon, and water.’ Choose the keywords with the highest search volume.

When researching keywords for your SEO campaign, think about your audience – what do they expect when they come to your site, and why should they choose you over your competitors?

The next thing to do is to find semantic keywords. Using highly-targeted keywords will increase your CTR and reduce the cost of your PPC campaigns. This, in turn, will lead to semantically higher relevance for your keywords which increases your quality score.

To find semantic keywords, you need to think about trending topics and build your semantic keyword database around them using Google Trends or similar tools. Another good way to come up with semantic keywords is to analyze social bookmarking tags.

You can also use Google search. Type in a keyword or phrase and scroll down. You’ll see your related terms. This can show you important information about what people look for when searching for that particular topic.

You can also see other suggestions for semantic keywords on Google Instant, including locations. Of course, you don’t want all of these terms, so you need to narrow down your list by category in Google Insights.

In this way, you’ll understand your target customer and create a list of actual keywords that resonate with your target audience.

Now, what to do with all of these files exported from different keyword tools?

• Put all the keywords you’ve found into one master file;
• Separate your keywords according to the number of words and searches;
• Find out the relevant keywords with up to 3 words;
• Find out keywords that are part of larger phrases;
• Set traffic limits based on the traffic your website gets;
• You may want to keep any relevant leftovers.

Finally, copy all of your keywords into one table for the SEO rank report. Now it’s time to look at the conversion side of your research. Go through your keywords and assign them to a specific target page. Then, it’s time to track them.

Make sure you look at organic visitors, exact match search, phrase match, and keyword diversity.

Step #5 Mobile-First SEO

Today, people are using their mobile phones a lot more than their computers. Therefore, mobile is the first traffic source for many websites. This doesn’t mean that you should abandon desktop entirely, but to focus your SEO campaign on mobile users.

This includes using RWD or responsive web design, measuring performance with a mobile rank tracker, simplifying your web design, removing interstitials, and minimizing redirects.

Step #6 Warp Speed

Websites nowadays should have a lighting speed to avoid the risk of the audience abandoning their site too soon. This has to do with the fact that most visitors are mobile users who expect nothing but a fast experience.

So, your SEO campaign should include your site’s speed as a critical point to avoid hurting your number of leads, visitors, and conversions.

Step #7 Address Voice Search

More and more mobile queries are voice searches, and this is a growing trend. People find it easier, more practical, and safer, especially when they drive.

The logical strategy is to focus on long-tail phrases, including questions as people tend to ask who, when, how, and where questions when they use mobile voice search.

What’s more, you should make sure your content is written in a conversational tone so that people can get the impression they are having a dialogue. This will add a sense of warmth to your website as well.

Step #8 Scannable Content

Scannable content is content that’s easy to scan. Your visitors would appreciate this as they usually move through your content quickly to find the exact information they want.

Writing scannable content will maximize your CTR, increase shares, improve engagement levels, etc. Plus, it’s a lot easier to read.

When it comes to SEO, including bullet points, sub-headers, bold text, and anything else that will help people read your content more easily helps search engine bots figure out what’s your content all about. This, in turn, will help your website rank better in SERPs.

Step #9 Make a Fan Page on Facebook

Facebook is one of the best sources of traffic, so you’ll really miss out if you’re not taking advantage of its users (around 2.4 billion monthly users.) Therefore, invest in a Facebook fan page to drive more traffic to your website. A well-constructed fan page can rank on Google as well and help improve your rankings.

Step #10 Write a High-Quality Content

Starting a blog can help your business. You should provide killer content so that you can notice results within a year. But, besides creating great content, you should also focus on detailed guides and professional design to make everything look better. This will help you stand out from the crowd, which is really difficult these days. Alternatively, you can use content creation tools to create high-quality content for your blog. Whenever you choose any content creation tool, make sure you test the content on an AI content detection tool.

Step #11 Conversion Optimization

The price you have to pay to get visitors to your site is constantly increasing. With conversion optimization, you can invest the budget you need in the future.

Before optimizing your website for conversions, you need to survey your audience. In this way, you’ll find out what parts of your site are confusing to them and why they are not making a purchase. You can use Qualaroo to find the right template with survey questions for your visitors.

Use that information to decide what to change on your site. When A/B testing, you should test until they are statistically important.

If your test is increasing or decreasing your conversions, it means your audience is sensitive to those particular web elements, and this is a good thing.

Let’s say you’re A/B testing the text of your call-to-action. If the variations don’t increase or decrease drastically, it means your visitors are not very sensitive to that particular text. So, the next thing to do would be to test your headline copy or other elements of your page.

Step #12 Backlinks

The next step after discovering your keywords is working on backlinks. They have to be highly relevant instead of rich in the anchor text, so focus on quality instead of quantity.

You need to search to find highly relevant links. For example, if you want to rank for the keyword ‘indoor cameras,’ the most relevant link would be from a webpage that ranks in the top 100 search results for that term.

Find sites that are not your competitors, and email the top 1000 of them that rank for the keyword you’re trying to rank for.

Make sure you point your building links to internal pages that are highly relevant to that particular keyword – a web page that shows the different types of indoor cameras instead of your homepage with different types of cameras, including outdoor cameras.

This strategy will help boost your organic traffic.

But, you need backlinks from sites with high authority instead of links from your nana’s blog. Hiring a PR agency can help you build links and improve your brand awareness.

Step #13 Work on Local SEO

Working on local SEO can help you promote your services to local customers who search for your type of business. To help increase your site’s local presence, local SEO uses Google, Bing, or Yelp.

You have to ensure your Google My Business and Bing Listings are set up properly, as the address must be exactly the same as that on your site. Then, you should optimize these listings with a profile photo, description, images, etc.

The next thing to do is claim and verify your listings so that no one can edit them without your permission. After completely optimizing your Bing and Google Local Listings, you should start creating Yellow Pages, Yelp, and other additional business citations. The benefits of these listings include the promotion of your Bing and Google listings and bringing more traffic to your website. If all of this sounds overwhelming to you, or you just don't have time to deal with local SEO right now, and you want to only focus on your business, you can always find great local SEO agencies that can take care of this instead of you.

As Shannon Steinberg, the SEO manager at Allied says, local listings are the bread and butter of her industry - real estate and apartment data services. Potential customers often begin their search for their next realtor either on a real estate business directory or right on Google and it's an easy win if you know how to optimize your Google My Business profile.

Step #14 Measuring Your Results

You have to know how to check if you’re making or losing money from your SEO campaign. That’s why you need to calculate your ROI or your return on investment.

To get the return on your SEO campaign, subtract the SEO cost per acquisition (total cost of the campaign) from the lifetime value of your customer (LTV).

To Sum Up

Creating a successful SEO campaign can be extremely lucrative for your business. Although the entire process takes time and effort, it’ll prevent you from wasting your money.

To get the best possible results, you need to carefully manage and continuously optimize your SEO campaign, as this is not a one-time thing. Make sure you keep up with the trends, and you’ll have a successful SEO campaign.